We cannot justifably believe that any currently available actions will have a non-negligible positive influence a billion or more years in the future. I offer three arguments for this thesis. According to the Infinite Washout Argument, given the non-zero chance that your actions will produce infinitely many effects, any finite effects will wash out in expectation. According to the Cluelessness Argument, we cannot justifiably guess what actions are likely to have positive effects in a billion-plus years. We cannot be justified, for example, in thinking that nuclear war or human extinction would be more likely to have bad than good consequences that far into the future. According to the Negligibility Argument, even if we could justifiably guess that some particular action is likelier to have good than bad consequences that far in the future, the odds of good consequences would be negligible due to the compounding of probabilities over time.

This ethnography explores the temporalizing practices of workers at the Litani River powerplant—a key site of national infrastructural development in Lebanon. Departing from dominant narratives of crisis or collapse, it argues that workers inhabit a distinct spatial and temporal mode described as tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi, an ambivalent alliance of convenience with the Litani river, its infrastructure, and the state. Rather than viewing their experience through paradigms of progress or decline, workers cultivate a modular relation to time, and to the seemingly isolated powerplant, marked by endurance. Tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi, the article suggests, is a mode of exercising and reproducing power at the intersection of material structures and embodied experience. Like a Möbius strip, its fraught political relations and dynamics of social reproduction continuously weave the space they constitute. It illustrates power’s reach through time while also revealing workers’ subtle ways of challenging it, beyond binaries of submission or resistance.

Douglas Laycock’s career in Religion Clause scholarship and advocacy spans two periods marked by two distinct concerns at the heart of the debates. This article connects them. In the first period, from the 1980s into the 2000s, the central issue was what general value or principle should drive Religion Clause decision-making. Laycock’s approach, substantive neutrality toward religion, focused on minimizing government effects on religious choices and thus led the way in reconciling two key values: neutrality on the one hand, and religious liberty or voluntarism on the other. In the second period, from the mid-2000s forward, religious liberty became caught up in the United States’ cycle of polarization. Laycock again led the way; his work on Religion Clause neutrality supports the effective defense of religious liberty in a polarized age. In particular, he called for aggregating neutrality: recognizing that any policy can have differing effects on the religious choices of different relevant actors and comparing those effects with the goal of minimizing burdensome effects on religious choices overall. This approach, done with care, can take account of the effect on competing sides and thus productively address polarized conflicts.

Word Grammar (WG), a dependency grammar, has historically permitted mutual dependency, a structure where two words depend on each other. This paper re-evaluates mutual dependency within WG, focusing on contradictions arising when dependency relations are inherently tied to word-order via WG’s ‘landmark’ relation. It is argued that mutual dependency which involves conflicting landmark relations is untenable. I examine earlier WG analyses of English dependent interrogatives and free relatives, which were the principal motivators for mutual dependency analyses. It is proposed that dependent interrogatives do not require mutual dependency and are better analysed with the verb as the head, with selection being semantic. Free relatives, however, with their matching effects where the wh-word is head, necessitate a form of mutual constraint. A solution is offered by refining WG’s theory of word-order and its relationship to extraction, by distinguishing between the general relationship of word-order, ‘landmark’ and a distinct relation of word-order that is part of the extraction start-rule. This approach allows for mutually constraining relations in free relatives without contradictory landmark assignments, thereby preserving a coherent theory of word-order while accommodating mutual dependency.

Whether the later Roman Empire ran short of precious or base metals, either at the level of the state or in private life, is a question that can only be answered in a tentative fashion. Surveying the period from the mid-2nd to the mid-7th c., this article weighs the difficulties presented by the full range of material and textual evidence, while attempting to establish a balance between all regions of the Roman world. It concludes by suggesting that there probably were indeed crises of metal production at certain periods, caused by the depletion of usable ores and hypothetically by a shortage of fuel.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it within a larger British world context.

Debates surrounding mandated instruction in the origin of the United States have reemerged in recent years. This article discusses teaching the Declaration of Independence as imperial history. It evaluates how mandates like the one in my state—Nevada—to teach “devotion to American institutions and ideals” through exploring “the origin and history” of Constitutional government have fared in the actual classroom. It considers the importance of embracing both the complexity and nuance of the story of the founding of the United States in today's divisive political climate.

After the Occultation of the Twelfth Imam (al-ghaybah al-kubrā) in the fourth AH/tenth CE century, the applicability of divinely ordained punishments, ḥudūd, became a subject of theo-juridical controversies between two groups of Shiʿi jurists: pro- and anti-ḥudūd. In the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the establishment of a Shiʿi theocracy, Iranian theocrats supported the pro-ḥudūd Shiʿi jurists, and as a result, ḥudūd punishments were incorporated into the Islamic Penal Code and have been applied by the state ever since. Some Iranian legal reformers, recognizing the challenges in applying ḥudūd punishments, have put forward two politico-juridical mechanisms (zarfiyat): the secondary ruling and the state order. These two mechanisms, the reformers assert, may be used by the Islamic Republic of Iran to suspend ḥudūd punishments. In this article, I examine both the arguments presented by reformers and the objections to these arguments raised by conservative and Shiʿi orthodox-minded jurists. These objections pose doctrinal challenges that impede the utilization of these mechanisms, thus obstructing the suspension of ḥudūd punishments.

War was an important, and underappreciated, force circulating global goods into and around early modern Britain. Capture at sea brought millions of pounds of merchandise into the British Isles, offering new groups of consumers new ways of participating in the expanding world of things. By tracing the presence in early modern Britain of paintings from colonial Spanish America, we better appreciate the economic, social, and cultural significance of maritime predation. We also identify new sources to explore the early modern world of goods, from the Admiralty records that document these captures, to literary celebrations of patriotic sea-dogs seizing Spanish treasure galleons, and family legends attributing a pirate provenance to Spanish American artworks. We should, in short, pay more attention to the role of war and violence in setting early modern goods in motion.

Sceptical theism is commonly deployed as a response to evidential arguments from evil by challenging our entitlement to infer, from the evils we observe, what God would or would not be likely to permit. Standard fine-tuning arguments, however, appear to require precisely the sort of expectation-guided reasoning that sceptical theism places under pressure: namely, the claim that a life-permitting universe is not too improbable given theism. Recent discussion has sharpened this tension: Donahue argues that sceptical-theist considerations undercut standard fine-tuning arguments, while Boyce argues that sceptical theists can nevertheless endorse a suitably revised version. I argue that Boyce’s proposal is philosophically important but dialectically costly. Boyce does not replace generic theism with a more specific hypothesis; rather, he keeps generic theism as the target hypothesis while allowing historically mediated background information, D, to generate the relevant theistic expectations. My objection is that once D is admitted for that positive purpose, it cannot be quarantined from adverse evidential assessment. The result is not merely that the problem of evil is formally reopened. Rather, enriched versions of evil, suffering, and divine hiddenness become serious enough to require independent theistic response. Boyce’s strategy therefore preserves coherence only by narrowing sceptical theism’s traditional broad anti-evil role.

Excavations in the city center of the ancient city of Doliche in southeast Türkiye have brought to light the remains of a monumental apsidal building. Although the structure is poorly preserved due to looting and spoliation, the results of three seasons of excavation allow for an initial analysis and preliminary reconstruction. This article presents the building for the first time and discusses its importance in improving our understanding of monumental urban architecture in the region. The building is interpreted as a temple, and the article explores its potential links with apsidal temples in southern Syria and the Roman imperial cult.

Longtermists such as William MacAskill maintain that if we are concerned about human well-being and the longterm future, we should embrace continued technological advancement and development, and that, indeed, one of the most significant threats to longterm human well-being and the well-being of other sentient creatures is technological stagnation – remaining at roughly the present technological level. This paper argues that we should be much more skeptical regarding claims that link continued technological development with positive contributions to well-being. We should take seriously that even if technological development has contributed significantly to improvements in well-being in the past, that we may reach or have already reached a point at which future technological development no longer does so, and that, in that event, thinking about longterm ethical concerns actually recommends developing the capability to slow down, stop, or even roll back (some) technological development.

Many claim that there is an important relationship between consciousness and welfare. Call this general view phenomenalism. One way of fleshing out phenomenalism is to hold that consciousness is what makes one the type of entity that can be noninstrumentally better or worse off in the first place. Consciousness is at least a necessary condition on welfare subjecthood. A different account holds that even if consciousness is not necessary for welfare subjecthood, conscious welfare subjects have a greater welfare capacity. We argue that the most likely source of support for either version of phenomenalism – hedonism about welfare goods and bads – provides no support at all. Along the way, we discuss an alternative view of welfare subjectivity and welfare capacity that does not appeal to consciousness but only to mentality, a view we call mentalism.

In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the U.S. Supreme Court held that neutral and generally applicable laws would no longer receive strict scrutiny review. Many feared that Smith had severely truncated the protection of the First Amendment Free Exercise Clause. Three years later, however, in a controversial Santerian slaughtering case, Douglas Laycock persuaded a unanimous Supreme Court in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah to highlight an important limitation on the Smith neutrality standard. Both “masked as well as overt” government hostility, targeting, or discrimination against religion are constitutionally “suspect,” Lukumi made clear. Recent Supreme Court free exercise cases have emphasized this limitation. Over the past decade, the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union are replaying the same story that played out in the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1980s and 1990s and have gradually weakened their religious freedom provisions into a guarantee of government neutrality alone. In their most recent cases, these pan-European high courts have upheld blatantly discriminatory regulations of Muslim and Jewish ritual slaughtering, favoring animal welfare over religious freedom. These courts need to take a lesson from Laycock’s argument in Lukumi that neutrality requires states not to take sides for or against religion and not to uphold laws that have the mere pretense of neutrality while targeting the core practices of religious minorities.

This article analyzes variation in and metalinguistic commentary surrounding the primary stressed vowel of the place-name ‘Chicago’. Sociolinguistic interview data with fifty-six lifelong Chicagoans from two adjacent neighborhoods reveal both social variation and apparent time evolution in the phonetic manifestation and phonemic patterning of the CHICAGO vowel. Contrastive metalinguistic ideologies substantiate this variation, as different speakers map ‘authentic’ versus ‘inauthentic’ Chicagoness to opposite phonemic variants. While previous work on place-names proposed linkages between place identity and linguistic material that can articulate stances toward geographic areas, we document inverted semiotic mappings among residents who otherwise share the same positive orientation to their neighborhood. We draw upon locally constructed chronotopes to account for the inverse polarization characterizing the CHICAGO vowel. We ultimately argue for dynamic conceptions of place-based linguistic features that attend more closely to the ideologically productive nature of local identity. (Authenticity, place, race, sociolinguistic variation, differentiation, chronotope)

Egalitarianism and prioritarianism are competing views about the ethics of distribution. Both views have wide scopes of concern. But, writing in this journal, Michael Otsuka has discovered a case that seems to show an interesting asymmetry between the limits of egalitarian and prioritarian concern. In that case, intuitively one outcome is better than another (in a respect relevant to the ethics of distribution); prioritarianism can recover that intuitive judgment; but egalitarianism seems unable to recover it. I show, however, that egalitarianism can recover the intuitive judgment in question on a well-motivated basis. That result is of interest because it shows the possibility and prima facie plausibility of a version of egalitarianism with a surprisingly wide scope of concern – one according to which it matters that some are worse off than those who (merely) could have existed.